RALEIGH — For the time in 20 years, a generation filled first with regular-season futility and, more recently, playoff frustration, the Carolina Hurricanes are headed back to the Stanley Cup Final.
The top-seeded Hurricanes crushed the Montreal Canadiens 6-1 on Friday night to win their first Eastern Conference Final since 2006 and did it in front of a raucous home crowd at Lenovo Center in Raleigh.
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The victory set off a wild celebration outside of the arena among fans who have waited a while for the franchise to return to hockey’s biggest stage.
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“It’s what you play for and what you dream of,” said Logan Stankoven, the team’s top goal scorer in the postseason. “You want nothing more than to hoist that Cup someday and share it with your teammates and your family. We still have a lot of work to get done here, but that’s what motivates you to play the game.”
The Canes didn’t touch the Prince of Wales Trophy, awarded to the Eastern Conference champion, during a postgame ceremony, adhering to hockey superstition about only picking up the Cup.
“I had a few guys ask me what I thought,” Brind’Amour said. “I said, ‘Do what you want, but don’t touch it.’”
The Hurricanes have bigger goals.
Since the NHL expanded to its current playoff format, Carolina is the first team to reach the Cup final with fewer than two losses. The Hurricanes raced through three playoff opponents, winning 12 of 13 games with the lone loss in Game against Montreal after 11 days off for Carolina. The Canes won back-to-back overtime games and then blew out the Canadiens 10-1 in the final two dominant wins.
There won’t be as much rest before the Hurricanes host Games 1 and 2 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Vegas Golden Knights. Game 1 is Tuesday, June 2.
“It’d be great to start as soon as we can,” Taylor Hall said. “... That 12 days off was way, way too much. I almost forgot how to play there for a bit.”
It is the third trip to the Stanley Cup Final for the franchise, which reached the final in 2002 and won the Cup in 2006. Head coach Rod Brind’Amour was the captain of the 2006 team and he scored in Game 7 in that Eastern Conference Final against Buffalo.
No such heroics were needed Friday night.
The Hurricanes scored three goals in an eight-minute span in the first period to take control of the decisive Game 5. Hall opened the scoring, followed by goals from linemate Stankoven and then Eric Robinson. Jackson Blake scored in the second period, Shayne Gostisbehere added a power-play goal in the second and Seth Jarvis capped it off with an empty net goal late in the third.
Six goals, six different players.
And another stellar night by goaltender Frederik Andersen.
It all added up to dominance — and a trip to the Cup.
“It’s the next step in the journey,” said Hall, a former No. 1 overall pick and league MVP who joined the Hurricanes in a midseason trade last year.
The next step for this team and for the franchise, which saw its share of sorrow after the 2006 title.
After hoisting the Cup for the only time in franchise history, Carolina missed the playoffs in 11 of 12 seasons, including nine straight seasons, quite a mark in a league where half the teams qualify for the postseason.
Even with a Cup and another Final appearance in 2002, critics maligned the market and often mentioned the franchise as a potential relocation target. The Hurricanes moved from Hartford, Conn. to North Carolina before the 1997-98 season.
In January 2018, Tom Dundon bought a majority stake in the franchise. He hired Brind’Amour, who had been an assistant coach with the Hurricanes.
And the Hurricanes haven’t missed the playoffs since, turning Raleigh into a hockey hotbed with a lengthy sellout streak, outdoor game and, importantly, no more talk about relocation.
They reached the conference final in Brind’Amour’s first season and under his intense leadership developed into one of the top regular-season teams in the NHL while playing a grinding style of hockey.
Carolina has won at least one playoff series every season under Brind’Amour, but had been derailed in the conference finals three times since 2019 — winning just a single game against 12 losses, including sweeps in 2019 and 2023 and a 4-1 defeat in 2025.
“It just felt like we had teams that could have got there and you’re not doing it and just so proud of every guy in here,” veteran forward Jordan Martinook said. “It’s been a crazy journey in my time here, but this team, it’s been really special.”
Those streaks and stats can be tossed aside. The 2026 Hurricanes have written a new narrative.
The blossoming of younger players like Logan Stankoven and Jackson Blake and the offseason additions of Nikolaj Ehlers and K’Andre Miller gave the Hurricanes more firepower and depth around its successful and largely homegrown core — players like Andrei Svechnikov, Seth Jarvis, Sebastian Aho and Jaccob Slavin – and vets like Martinook and captain Jordan Staal.
“They’ve laid the foundation for everything that’s gone on here,” Hall said.
Andersen, a 36-year-old veteran coming off his worst regular season, provided everything the Hurricanes needed in net. He held Montreal scoreless for more than 160 minutes of game play between Games 3 and 5, setting a franchise postseason record.
“His calming presence back there and how well he plays the puck. He just doesn’t scramble around the net. It’s nice when you have a guy like that to settle things down and just seems to make that big save when we need him to,” Stankoven said.
Andersen’s agent Claude Lemieux, a four-time Stanley Cup champion, died after taking his own life Thursday, according to authorities. He was 60. Lemieux’s son, Brendan, played 32 games for the Hurricanes in the 2023-24 season.
“He was amazing,” said Brind’Amour, who wasn’t sure if Andersen would be able to play. “We knew that this was going to be tough for him. The nature of what happened. … He shook it off and battled through it and you saw the emotion after the game. He made us all proud.”
That depth and overall roster talent has been on display in the playoffs. Carolina won all five of its overtime games with a different player scoring the winning goal in each game. Its fourth line dominated for stretches of the series against Philadelphia and Montreal.
The Hurricanes ferocious style, their forechecking, their puck possession, their relentlessness wore down its opponents over each series and Montreal, in particular. The Canadiens, coming off two grueling seven-game series, were no match for a fresher, deeper Carolina team after Game 1, a 6-2 Montreal victory that increasingly looked like an aberration as the series wore on.
“This has been eight years of this is where we should have been is the way we felt,” Brind’Amour said. “.Now we’re finally here.”
Carolina is headed to the Stanley Cup Final to face a Vegas team that’s been among the league’s best since entering as an expansion team in 2017. Vegas reached the final in its first season, won the title in 2023 and is back again. The Golden Knights won the Pacific Division, but managed just 39 wins in the regular season. Carolina had 53 wins.
“It’s going to be a challenge for us,” Stankoven said. “If we keep bringing the game that we have now, it puts us in a good spot.”